With the Packers thumping the Bears and the Vikings providing the ’72 Dolphins with reason to uncork another bottle of champagne (Click on Link), reality is starting to make a comeback. Speaking of needing to get back on track, NFL TV ratings are down a whopping 10% this year. Reflecting on why that might be, Coach recalls the late, great British comedic genius, Benny Hill, when he was once presented with this query: What’s worse, ignorance or apathy? …to which he replied, “I don’t know and I don’t care.” Some blame 2016 NFL apathy on Rodger Goodell for disenfranchising fans by keeping Tom Brady off the field for 4 weeks, or for over-saturating the market with Thursday night, Sunday night and Monday night games; yet others say simply putting the Vikings on television outside of the twin-cities market is nauseating for archetypal Americans – all true, but Coach thinks it’s the disheartening presidential race that is sucking our NFL team spirit out of America. The good news is that the countdown for picking the lesser of 2 evils is just about over. A staggering 1/3 of registered voters (not including the deceased and illegal immigrant voters) are STILL undecided. Since there’s a good chance that demographic includes you, this short clip will provide you a unique perspective (Click on Link) on both of the 2 major party candidates, and might just be the difference maker for your final decision. You’re welcome. Back to football… Create a seam here - X' & O's about the game or a scheme Back in the ‘80s there was a drug addicted, mentally unstable rock star named Joe Walsh of a band called The Eagles, which had a hit song called Hotel California. Joe Walsh’s guitar riffs in that song are amazing and still enjoyed today by music lovers of all ages. Joe’s older brother, William, was the white sheep of the family: always did his homework and got good grades, came home on time, and certainly said “No!” to drugs. Bill liked the game of football, and excelled in the game of Risk! Putting those two passions together, he devised a system of offensive strategy that was the inverse of conventional football wisdom at the time. He thought, “What if we passed to set up the run, instead of the other way around?” He tinkered with this concept as Offensive Coordinator for the Cincinnati Bengals while working under the tutelage of mentor Paul Brown, and then it became known as the “West Coast” Offense (the term coined by mistake, thanks to a reporter’s misquote of Bernie Kosar) when put into action under his reign as head coach of the San Francisco 49ers. Mike Holmgren was Offensive Coordinator for Bill Walsh back then, and Mike McCarthy was quarterbacks coach for Mike Holmgren in Green Bay, so you can see why Mike McCarthy is so familiar with that strategic gem from the gay bay. The concept is ball-control characterized by short (high-percentage), horizontal passing routes in lieu of running plays to "stretch out" defenses, opening up the potential for long runs or long passes. Precise, horizontal stretch-based passes allows the ball to be thrown to intermediate routes; the theory being that the receiver will make up the total yardage. San Fran exploited defenses with relatively weak-armed Joe Montanna using Roger Craig (imagine Ty Montgomery) to catch passes out of the backfield while Jerry Rice (Dvante Adams / Randall Cobb) and John Taylor (Jordy Nelson / Trevor Davis) ran slants and moved the chains with YAC. Granted, none of today’s Packers are anywhere near Jerry Rice’s talent, except maybe Justin Perillo, but you get the idea. Good conditioning, the ability to consistently catch balls (rarely ever dropping them), and longevity, in conjunction with the West Coast Offense, which took advantage of those traits, are what made Jerry Rice a Hall of Famer and the 2nd best receiver of all time. Thursday night, Dvante Adams didn’t drop any of his 13 passes, he gained 132 yards and scored 2 touchdowns, and then he was named NFC player of the week. Ty Montgomery had just as many yards, albeit a mix of the pass (horizontal, YAC) and the run out of the backfield. Yep, all of that offensive production from just an interesting couple of guys -- which, coincidentally, is exactly the same phrase that former Eagles drummer, Don Henley, used to describe Bill Walsh’s younger brother, Joe. WTF - The Coach's take on a bad ref call or a bad play call or the like As I drove to my bowhunting stand this weekend, I couldn’t help but think (in a Jerry Seinfeld sort of way), “What’s the deal with those 2 radio stations near the bottom of the radio dial that always play the exact same thing?” It’s 2 different channels, but they have the same programming at the same time. Why bother with 2? Why not just 1. Nobody actually listens to it anyway, so why have 2? You know the drill… You’re driving through the middle of nowhere and you’re station gets so scratchy that you have to find a different one outside of your saved FAVORITE buttons. So you hit the SCAN feature on the car radio, and it always stops when it picks up reception down somewhere between 87.1 and 90.9. I think it’s public radio (maybe?) and it’s usually like classical music (I think, although it could be opera, or maybe something else I don’t ever listen to), or an interview with a nutjob candidate from some obscure political party that’s run by activists who were beaten up by both stoners and jocks in high school for playing hacky-sack in the hall, or some unknown starving actors playing the characters of a book that they are reading to you, or a couple of ladies talking (Click on Link) about their favorite food dish. When the SCAN feature stops there, you move like lightning to hit that SCAN button again in search of the next available channel as soon as possible – but the problem is, the next available channel plays the exact same crap! I had a double whammy this weekend … I got fooled by 2 separate pairs of nested crap channels on the radio. It played out something like this as I’m driving through the countryside before dawn: …Hey, this is a good song (Click on Link)… Oh, crap, my station is getting out of range, push the SCAN button. Oh, crap, NPR, hit SCAN (wicked quick). Oh, crap, an unexpected NPR-like channel, caught me off guard there, hit SCAN. CRAP! – back to NPR1, hit SCAN fast! CRAP! CRAP! Sideswiped by NPR2 again! WTF? Then I just played Pandora on my phone the rest of the way. The end. Why is Lady Gaga in a Bud Light commercial? Bud Light used to have smiling basketball players cracking beers open together in the locker room after a game. Now that's what a beer commercial is supposed to be. Not some Pop40 bitch that has a face easily modeled by a clown making balloon animals. I thought Spuds MacKenzie was bad, but this is downright unacceptable. I don't drink much of that Anhowzyer-Bush concoction resembling canoe copulation anyway, but now I'm calling for an all-out boycott until Bud Light gets Bob Uecker to mock his baseball career in Miller Lite fashion, only to peddle Bud Light, like the Verizon "Can you hear me now?" guy does these days as he whores himself out for Sprint. The Bears Still Suck - the Coach has proof Here’s an actual article from the local paper: The Packers clobbered the Bears with 1 hand tied behind our back last Thursday, so the NFL team from Illinoise is now 1-6 and battling the winless Cleveland Clowns for 1st QB to be picked in the 2017 draft (Man, I’d hate to be THAT guy). Just for the fun of piling on, we broke Hoyer’s arm (Click on Link), too. I’m not exactly sure what the term “epic proportions” means, but it feels like the appropriate term to describe how bad the Bears are. To put this in historical perspective, Chicago’s football team’s season was over before its baseball team’s was. …just further proof that the Bears still suck. The old mathematical axiom asks “What is infinity times infinity?” That’s a good approximation for the quantitative measure of how bad the Bears actually suck. BTW, the answer is “Infinity squared.” You’re welcome. Udder stuff - commentary from the Badger Underground You can throw out the Cornholers’ record, ranking and stats when analyzing this season. Five of their wins have come against teams with losing records and they needed to come from behind in several of those wins against lowly opponents. One area of improvement that cannot be denied is owning the fourth quarter this season vs. caving in during the fourth quarter last year. The Cornholers’ banged up OL vs. WI’s front seven minus their NT and all-world ILB Cichy will be an interesting matchup. Cichy covered up nicely for the NT drop-off last week against Iowa. Nebraska likely will not be able to exploit WI’s second stringers. With Biegel back closer to full strength, he, Watt & Dooley should be able to contain and rough up Armstrong. Armstrong continues the recent Nebraska tradition of throwing forward passes like they are skipping stones. This year’s group of Cornholer receivers is quite talented. Armstrong will occasionally throw jump balls, hoping they come down with it. Tindal & Jamerson are questionable for WI. If the LB’s continue their relentless harassment of opponent QB’s, it won’t matter who we have playing CB. The Cornholer defense has put up good numbers, but against bottom feeding competition. I expect WI’s offense to have a good deal of success against them, provided they aren’t fumbling at the goal line and missing FG’s. Both of WI’s top guards returned last week vs. the Hogeyes. WI tinkered with several OL combinations last week, probably due to very poor pass protection. Hornibrook continues to take T-bone hits, necessitating alternating in Bart Houston. WI should continue to get plenty of mileage out of Houston coming in, rolling out and throwing short to intermediate passes. Opponents are teeing off on WI’s pass blocking on 3rd & long situations. WI is an 8-point favorite, but the Cornholers are our bitches. We own them. Look for WI to roll, with Armstrong being taken off the field in pieces. Expect a score in the vicinity of 31-9. If you're lucky enough to be at the game, be sure to watch closely. We're gonna kick your a$$ - predictions for the next game With both teams in the top ten of power rankings, this week’s NFL main matinee matchup should help for TV ratings, although Atlanta and Green Bay are VERY different cities in terms of football fandom. Most football fans in Atlanta are either Georgia Tech fans or are fans of other NFL teams because they relocated to Atlanta from somewhere else in search of warmer weather, traffic jams, and elderly strippers. The Falcons have never won a championship; the Packers have won a league leading 13! Aaron has done well against Matt in the Georgia dome the last coupla visits there, including the 48-21 blowout in the #6 vs #1 Divisional Playoff Game en route to winning SB 45 (Badger Underground was there as the fair-weather fans of north Georgia made early for the exits) and the 25-14 victory again the following year during the regular season (Coach and Badger Underground in attendance as part of a “surprise” birthday party road trip drunk fest. Good times, good times). In the Bears game we broke the pitchers arm and as much as we screamed for Cutler to come in the game, the wimp had made himself inactive so we had to settle for a USC pretty boy…who had a 40 something QB rating and we turned the 1-5 Bears into the 1-6 Bears. Questions? “It’s tough in the NFL”, “they are pro’s too”, “they get paid too”, “it’s tough to win a game in the NFL”…yada, yada, yada. The Bears really do suck, even more than usual (more below). But, A-Rod had a 300+ yd game, and importantly, had several passes on target. Even more impressively, with no Eddy or James to run the rock, Montgomery and Cobb picked up the slack while the Ripper added eleven yards. Ripper’s 11 was a 1-yard run followed by 10-yards of YAS (Yards After Scrum). So winning ugly it was, but with about half the team injured and/or inactive, we aint givin none back. There was a palpable feeling of relief in Lambeau after the win and a collective hope that we are starting to rebound a bit. Sooper Bowl LI Watch Ok Packer fans….all we wanna do is git a trophy, so Coach is going to keep tracking how we fit in with the rest of the league: First: With a win over the god-awful Bears we improved our PPG differential to +2.8 and we rank 12th overall. The +2.8 predicts about 11 wins, which matches perfectly with the PPG ranking of our schedule (Eagles, Vikings and Seahawks are above us in PPG ranking, so assuming 3 losses there we go 11-5 on the season). Of course the Stats don’t predict squat on individual games…but they do tend to track over time and 11-5 is about where the eye-test has us right now considering our strength (or weakness) of schedule. Second: We are still well off the mark in both Defensive Ranking (12th) and Offensive Ranking (14th) compared with the 2010 team (2nd and 10th respectively). In fact, the stats say that 2016 is identical to 2015. No wonder if feels like déjà vu all over again. As “proven” above, we will lose to the Falcons…right? Wrong! Linsley out? No problem ---- OL performing better than ever (Josh who? Did he play with Brent Faver?) Chris Banjo and Jared Abbrederis added to IR…to make room for this year's people's champ… …Geronimo Allison! ...which happens to be the coolest athlete name since DeWanna Bonner…honestly, you can’t make this stuff up. Maybe it’s only Coach in a delirious state, but he has a very good feeling about winning agin’ the Dirty Birds. Yeah they have the Speaker of the House slinging the ball all over the yard to guys with names like Orange Julius, but we have a bunch of rookies and first year players who look real. Good ole’ seasoned vet Ladarius Gunter struggled against the Cowboys, but now with two starts under his belt he looks good. 2016 draft picks Kenny Clark (1st round, DT), Kyler Fackrell (3rd, OLB) and Blake Martinez (4th, ILB) all have made really good contributions to the D, and 5th Rnd WR Trevor Davis actually returned a punt for a few yards! Those contributions and Nick Perry (former 1st rounder from USC) tearing it up are starting to give Coach a little bit of confidence. What the heck, Shanker Schum even kicked a punt over 40 yards, will wonders never cease? No kids, we’re not gonna lose. Take it to the bank: Packers 27 - Dirty Birds 20 JB - Packer players you forgot about, but stories you'll remember about them Coach and Coach’s brother have a long-standing argument regarding a certain football that was found by Mom long after the 2 of us had moved out. “Is this yours or is it your brother’s?” Of course it was mine. It was a Green Bay Packers edition knock-off of an official NFL “The Duke” football by Wilson, colored red, white and blue, with a mass-produced faux-signature of “#42 John Brockington” on it. Of COURSE it was mine. It doesn’t matter that the football was a piece of crap (Perhaps one of the first MADE IN CHINA experiments? Probably a “free gift” that Dad went out of his way to get for us by taking a test drive of a vehicle that he could not afford and had no intention of buying). And it doesn’t matter that the colored “pigskin” covering started to flake off soon after initial use, making it slippery to the touch and a foreign-material risk to human eyes. I caught probably a thousand pretend touchdowns (and performed their re-enactments in pretend slow motion) diving after that ball into a pile of leaves. It didn’t matter that we raked them without cleaning up the dog poop first … that’s just football in the yard, man. And I don’t want to brag, but I also kicked thousands of field goals and extra points over the telephone line and into the alley with that football. And when I tee’d it up after a score, I could command either touchbacks or onside kicks at will. Of course it was mine. I can’t believe my brother still has it. Imagine the early ‘70s in Green Bay, when championships seemed very recent, yet felt so unbelievably far away. In Charles Dickens’ classic, A Tale of Two Cities, the work begins “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, ….” Enter John Brockington. John Brockington was a stud running back from the Ohio State University and a product of their infamous Head Coach, Woody Hayes (Click on Link). And, yes (for you younger readers), the Buckeyes were really good back then, too. Brockington was selected by the Packers in the 1st Round of the 1971 NFL Draft with the 9th overall pick. Brockington played in Green Bay from 1971-1977. He was traded by the Packers to the Kansas City Chiefs in 1977 after playing in one game that year with Green Bay. He started every game during his time as a Packer, and he averaged 5.1-yards per carry his rookie season! People were thinking Paul Hornung!, Jim Taylor!, John Brockington!(?) Well, he probably was the best player on those early ‘70s teams. Highlights of John Brockington’s Green Bay Packers career include being a 3 Time Pro Bowl Selection and an All-Pro Selection in 1971, 1972 and 1973, NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year in 1971 and a Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame Inductee in 1984. He also was the first NFL player to ever rush for 1,000 yards or more in each of his first three seasons. Unfortunately for John, though, he didn’t have Forrest Gregg and Jerry Kramer blocking for him, and only 1 of those 6 seasons resulted in a winning record. He amassed over 5,000 yards across 85 games, averaging 3.9 per carry. Not too shabby considering the rest of the team sucked – especially the QB’s (Scott Hunter, Jerry Tagge, John Hadl), so defenses usually played Green Bay to run. What is fun (for me anyways) to think about, is the pairings we had in the backfield lo those many years ago. For example,
Brockington’s running style relied on upper and lower body strength. With his powerful legs and a vicious stiff arm, he was the 1970’s version of what we now refer to as “Eddie Lacy” (except the fatass part) or maybe a Running Back version of Mike Daniels. Even though he also had exceptional speed, Brockington preferred to break tackles and run over defenders rather than run away from them. What kid wouldn’t want a John Brockington football?
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Author"Coach" is the insightful collective brain and funny bone of a few legendary Packer fans who provide everything you need to know (and what Packers beat writers often plagiarize) about the Green & Gold, plus a weekly guest appearance by The Badger Underground. Archives
November 2022
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